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View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoDevonere Simmonds, shown in a surveillance photo at Convenient Plus Food Mart on E. Livingston Avenue, is wanted in connection with the shooting death of clerk Imran Ashgar.

The search began on Monday afternoon, when Simmonds went home to his mother’s South Side house
and told her he’d killed a man. Maya Foster called Columbus police.

“I need — my son just confessed to me that that he killed someone last night,” she told a
dispatcher in her 2:40 p.m. 911 call. “And I need a police officer here. He just left the house,
and I don’t know what to do.”

Foster, 38, went on to tell the dispatcher that her son had a warrant pending for cutting off
his court-ordered electronic ankle monitor, and she gave a description of him: brown skin, wearing
a black T-shirt, blue jeans and Puma tennis shoes. He’s missing a front tooth, she said, and he
needs a haircut.

Officers swarmed the area where Foster said Simmonds had gone, down Whittier Street from her
Siebert Street home. They checked where he liked to hang out — the Little Giant market at Whittier
and Oakwood; a corner at Forest and 22nd; another at Linwood and Siebert. Nothing. Dispatchers
closed out the incident about an hour later, records show.

Two days after he visited his mother, Simmonds surfaced, this time on a surveillance video
inside the Convenient Plus Food Mart on E. Livingston Avenue, pointing a gun at clerk Imran
Ashgar.

Ashgar, 34, was shot and killed about 11 p.m. Wednesday. Several hours later, 17-year-old Lamont
Frazier was found shot to death only blocks from the carryout. Acquaintances say Frazier and
Simmonds knew each other. Simmonds has been charged with a delinquency count of murder in Ashgar’s
death. Early this morning, Columbus police issued a news release saying a second teen has been
charged in the carryout shooting. Nathaniel Brunner, 18, is charged with one count of murder.
Brunner's address wasn't given. No charges have been filed in Frazier’s death.

Cmdr. Kelly Weiner, of the Columbus Police Division’s Crimes Against Persons bureau, said she
could not elaborate on the search for Simmonds, either before Ashgar’s killing or after, because it
would reveal the Police Division’s tactics.

Simmonds, authorities said, is considered to be dangerous, and investigators say no one but
police should confront him.

According to the 911 call made by Simmonds’ mother, he told her he had accidentally shot someone
on Lilley Avenue on Sunday, and he had been playing with a shotgun in a car when it went off. But
police say that’s not exactly how it appears the shooting happened. Investigators said Quinten
Ellis-John Prater, 22, was found dead outside a vacant house at 777 Lilley Ave., and James E.
Norvet III, 21, was found shot and unconscious inside a car parked nearby. So far, no charges have
been filed in the Sunday shootings.

Even before the murder charge was filed in Wednesday’s carryout shooting, Simmonds could have
been arrested on a warrant that had been filed against him on June 26 for a probation violation.
The day before, he’d cut off the court-ordered ankle monitor he was wearing for a burglary charge
and fled his house. It was one in a series of probation violations that Simmonds had committed
dating back to 2010, juvenile court records show.

Simmonds has more than 10 cases on his record in Franklin County Juvenile Court, beginning when
he was about 13 years old, including two convictions for carrying a concealed weapon. Twice in
2011, he was caught with loaded handguns in his sweatshirt pocket.

Bernard Houston, deputy director and chief probation officer at the court, said that when a
youth violates probation, the department files a warrant, but it’s up to police officers to arrest
the offender.The Rev. Frederick LaMarr, pastor of Faith Missionary Baptist Church who has been a
mentor to Simmonds, said he had reached out to the teen’s probation officer last month in an
attempt to get him picked up on the warrant.LaMarr said he’s frustrated with the number of kids in
the neighborhood who are placed on electronic monitoring only to repeatedly violate the terms of
their probation without repercussion. He said they cause trouble for others.

“It’s unfortunate that it’s not until someone dies that we begin to react and feel like
ambulance chasers,” LaMarr said. “We have to run around, and now we have to pick him up because he
took a life.